Böcker av M J Nicholls

Verily miffed by the chancres of chance, chronically ineffective politician Derek Haffman affects to effect an unspecified political revolution by pickpocketing his colleagues in the lobby of the Scottish Parliament. In the wake of the abject failure of this objectless mission, repercussions naturally unfold in painfully precise procession, forcing Derek and his chronically untalented mistress, the singer in an avant-garde rock band too toxic for human ears, to flee to Cádiz. An unexpected visit from disgraced former politician and bestselling author Jethro Quiver unpeels another layer from the onion of shame in this shambling comic novel that chronicles the descent of a passionately aimless man, a rebel unable to think up an appropriate cause to lend his rebelling talents.A pleasantly unpleasant tale told in four blissfully interminable chapters by the Milky Way's leading virtuoso of the vowels and consonants, The Fall and Fall of Derek Haffman is the perfect read for anyone open to consider that unspecified solutions to unidentified political problems may not yield juicily delectable results.

At the Husavík Research Institute, a paradise of Nordic perfection where the blemished are banished and the pretty are promoted, acne-ridden Magnus is sent on a bogus anthropological fact-finding mission to visit every village, town, and city in Wales to file "reports" for Iceland's upcoming colonisation. The reports he composes are fragments of snarky travelogue, highly suspicious tales of local folklore, unforgiving recaps of childhood trauma, and cris de coeur from a misanthropic outsider fated to stalk the wild Welsh countryside suffering squeamish erotic reveries about Helga Horsedóttir. Presented in alphabetical, achronological order, Condemned to Cymru is a comico-pimply picaresque, a digressive ramble into the dark heart of boredom, and the essential reference encyclopedia of self-hatred.

Fiction. Marcus Schott, sacked from serving succour to suckers and loans to losers, leaves the office life to luxuriate in literature. His plan is to read every title featured in Dr. Peter Boxall's notorious compendium 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Motoring toward a small pre-purchased cottage on the Orkney Isles, Marcus soon encounters fatal hiccups in his scheme to compress a lifetime's reading into three years. These hiccups include skittish librarian Isobel Bartmel, self-cauterising critic Raine Upright, and the unpredictable happenings of the characterless Orkney peoples, too long trapped in their bothies of banality, each pushing Marcus further from his ecstatic vision of total list completion. A light comedy with a sunny paradisiac quality, rich in verbal virtuosity, Rabelaisian lists, and the occasional outburst of cheerful, cathartic violence, THE 1002ND BOOK is the ultimate summer novel against summer novels: an anti-crowdpleaser with a tidy, cinematic plot that should please both crowds and all those thoroughly depressed by them.